The development of an effective purifying process active against a broad spectrum of infectious agents could improve the safety level of blood products by eliminating infectious agents that may remain undetected by current procedures or new infectious agents for which no screening test has been developed yet.
In the context of emergency conditions such as military operations on the battlefield and peacekeeping operations where supplying, conserving and testing of safe blood becomes a real challenge, the development of a technology that would provide real-time blood purification when withdrawing blood from a donor would represent an important progress.
In the context of infectious diseases, the development of a technology that would provide real-time blood purification would enable blood to be withdrawn form a patient, purified and provided back to the patient attenuating or curing the disease.
It is known that iodinated resins such as disclosed and claimed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,639,452, which issued to Pierre Jean Messier on Jun. 17, 1997 and is entitled “Iodine/resin disinfectant and a procedure for the preparation thereof” can be used to purify biological fluids such as blood. It has been found however that depending on the degree of infection and or usage of the given purification system, situations exist in which the use of such resins damage some or all of the blood constituents before effective purification is accomplished, the contact time between the resin and the cells/substrate being one of the determining factors in terms of preservation of cellular integrity.